The 2034 Winter Olympics will take place in Salt Lake City, but the International Olympic Committee is retaining the right to cancel over U.S. criticisms of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
That provision was included in a revised hosting contract that contained a new clause about respecting the global sports doping regulator. The change came as American authorities investigate a case in which 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned substance in 2020—several of whom then won gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics the following year.
The positive tests went undisclosed until a New York Times investigation in April. The report claimed WADA decided not to hold the athletes to account despite being handed “intelligence suggesting a cover-up and doping by Chinese swimmers.”
WADA said it did not have evidence to challenge a conclusion from China’s antidoping agency that the swimmers unwittingly ingested small amounts of the banned drug trimetazidine from a contaminated food supply in a hotel where they’d stayed.
The IOC’s top legal official John Coates said Salt Lake City officials had agreed to the new hosting contract. It now contains a clause allowing the IOC to terminate the contract in cases where “the supreme authority of the World Anti-Doping Agency in the fight against doping is not fully respected or if the application of the World Anti-Doping Code is hindered or undermined,” according to an IOC news release.
IOC voted 83-6 to award the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to Salt Lake City on Wednesday, though the decision was essentially a formality after the Utah bid was recommended by the committee’s future host commission last year.
Before the vote, several committee officials voiced concerns about the U.S. scrutiny of WADA. IOC member Ingmar De Vos said the Chinese swimmers case was “clearly not a case of doping.”
“Despite being a simple case of contamination, WADA was accused by some stakeholder representatives and in the media of the worst possible thing an anti-doping organization can [have] happen: Namely, that it would cover up cases of doping in order to favor a particular country or a group of athletes,” he said.
Complaining about U.S. authorities’ and lawmakers’ attempts to examine the case, he added: “We really need to understand what is going to happen in the future, and where is this going to end?”
The animosity came even as committee members praised Salt Lake City’s bid, which had the advantage of having many winter sports facilities already built and preserved since it last hosted the games, in 2002.
Those games are remembered today for truly astonishing levels of corruption during the bidding process in which IOC members were accused of accepting cash and gift bribes—including college scholarships and airline tickets. Ten members were either expelled or resigned in the wake of the scandal.
The tournament was also marred by an unrelated scandal in the pairs figure skating in which the event was accused of being rigged. Two teams were eventually awarded gold medals, and the International Skating Union subsequently changed its scoring system.
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